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In 2001, Reuters looked like a dinosaur â out of date, lumbering and prey to younger, nimbler competitors. The companyâs revenues and shares went into freefall and the media speculated that the companyâs anti-takeover provisions, established to protect Reutersâ editorial independence, would be waived if the right offer was made.

David Grigson, Reuters: The brand has remained incredibly strong despite the hammering it has received in the press

For evidence of the straits in which the company found itself, look no further than its 2004 annual report, which states: “The Reuters of three years ago was at a crisis point.” David Grigson, the chief financial officer, is equally forthright. “At some point, Reuters took its eye off the ball and allowed its products to become less competitive in the marketplace. The heady days of the 1990s disguised it to some extent, but Reuters was badly exposed after the bubble burst in 2000. We paid a heavy price,” he admits.

Indeed it did. As the technology boom went into sharp reverse, Reuters’ shares went from more than £14 to little over £1, prompting a wholesale rethink of the business. The company had started to focus on its sprawling structure and cost base and it first accelerated and then widened this programme, emphasising competitiveness and customer service and cost savings.

Reuters dubbed the strategy Fast Forward and announced it would deliver £440m (€643m) in savings, or a third of the company’s cost base, by 2006. “We’re on track to do that,” says Grigson, though the dollar’s weakness has meant the target has become more challenging.

Disposals have been central to the strategy. In three years, the company has sold or closed 80 businesses, with the two largest deals completed only in recent weeks. In March, it offloaded Radianz, its networks business, to BT; last month, it sold its 60% shareholding in Instinet, the electronic brokerage firm, to Nasdaq for $1bn. “These things are coming through at a regular interval these days,” says Grigson, who is upbeat and energetic and gives little sign of being punch-drunk from the deals.

He says Instinet needed to be fixed before it could be sold, while Radianz had to be extracted from a complex joint venture. “We didn’t go straight to the bankers and say ‘take them all off our hands, thank you very much’,” he says. He adds, however, that Reuters is careful to spread fees widely. “You can make an assumption given that Reuters has all the major financial institutions and banks as customers, we’ll engage with as many of those banks as possible.”

The emphasis on disposals has been to return Reuters to its core information business – in 1865 it was the first agency to break the news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. “From 2006, the ‘Reuters Group’ will equal the ‘Reuters company’ and you don’t need to make the distinction about what else is in the group, like Instinet or Radianz,” says Grigson. “It’s about making Reuters less complex because these businesses were distractions.”

He stresses that Fast Forward is not just about paring costs but about fundamentally changing the way Reuters does business, such as improving customer service and cutting complexity: Reuters’ product line has been reduced from 1,300 to 50.

“We’ve focused attention on the relatively small number of things that really matter,” he says. “Part of my role has been to introduce a much more disciplined performance culture into the organisation, holding people accountable and making sure it’s embedded in incentive schemes and bonus schemes. We measure the hell out of everything these days.

“That is the ‘fix it’ of the Fast Forward phase, and it’s mostly done. That has got us back to an equilibrium where people are confidently predicting that in the not too distant future, Reuters will return to growth.”

Executing Fast Forward has been one part of Grigson’s life over the past three years; selling the plan to disgruntled investors, frustrated analysts and a cynical media has been another.

“We made some changes to the investor relations function – it needed an injection of new blood and new thinking. The first thing we did was no more than to lift the veil on this business. Reuters had become a difficult company to understand. We were honest about what our problems were, what we were going to do about them, and we offered some indicators for the market to track our progress,” he says.

“Those kinds of things made an enormous difference to the investor perception of what we were trying to do.

“There were bad days in 2001 and 2002 as we became aware how much the market was in decline and how much the lack of competitiveness was going to damage us. That process of awareness is painful. But by mid-2002 we started to feel that we were really good at taking out cost, and that this business had a great future and we had to get this on its way and get it done.

“We knew things would turn round, but meanwhile the share price kept falling and the papers kept writing their ‘great British company in terminal decline’ articles. In a sense we could shrug those off, because we knew things were on the turn but it takes a little time for the market to catch up.”

The markets largely see Grigson and his chief executive, Tom Glocer, as having inherited Reuters’ problems rather than causing them and support for them appears strong. “They have basically saved the company. It was going downhill very fast,” says one analyst.

Now Fast Forward is nearing its end, speculation abounds that Reuters will seek another catchy title for its growth strategy. One analyst says: “I suspect there will be a son of Fast Forward. The big question is what happens next at Reuters.”

Another analyst says: “Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief when Fast Forward is complete; it’s slightly overstayed its welcome. They should already be investing more in sales and marketing, but they’re wedded to £440m in cost savings. The big debate is whether there’s growth out there to invest in.”

Grigson is naturally confident there is. “The industry is going through structural changes, no question. The move from people-based trading to electronic systems trading is taking place and underneath that the number of instruments being traded is exploding. That plays to us,” he says, adding that, in a complex world, Reuters’ growth will come from its ability to deliver reliable, secure and bespoke data.

In a dig at Reuters’ rival, Bloomberg, he says: “If anyone thinks we can grow this business by increasing the number of terminals sitting on people’s desks, they’re not looking at what’s happening in financial services, which is that the number of people on trading desks is declining and will continue to decline as electronic systems take over.”

A second source of growth will come from building on the strength of Reuters’ brand, aided by the recent appointment as chairman of Niall Fitzgerald, former chief executive of Unilever.

“He comes from a background in which he understands the powers of brands,” says Grigson. “One of the remarkable features of this organisation is that, despite its difficulties, the brand has remained incredibly strong despite the hammering it has received in the press and the fact that it hasn’t received a lot of attention in terms of investment and profile.”

Grigson says it is not merely important that Reuters flourishes, but essential. “At its heart, the global financial markets would not work without Reuters,” he says. “If we decided one day to switch everything off and go on an extended holiday, the world’s financial markets would collapse.”